John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest

By Iain McCalman

A rich biography of artist-turned-environmental campaigner John Bu sst.Known to his enemies as The Bingil Bay Bastard' , John Bu sst, a Bendigo-born Melbourne bohemian artist, moved to tropical Bedarra Island in North Queensland and underwent an extraordinary transformation to become one of Australia' s most successful conservationists. In the 1960s and early 70s Bu sst led campaigns to protect two of Australia' s most important and endangered environments — saving lowland rainforests from destruction and the Great Barrier Reef from reckless resource mining for oil, gas, cement and fertiliser. A plan Bu sst likened to bulldozing the Taj Mahal to make road gravel' . Along the way Bu sst obtained the active support of five current or future prime ministers — Holt, Whitlam, Gorton, Hawke and Fraser.This inspiring biography, from award-winning historian Iain McCalman, is a timely reminder that the passionate commitment of ordinary citizens is crucial to achieving truly transformative environmental change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781742239026

Iain McCalman

IAIN MCCALMAN is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of eight previous books, including Darwin’s Armada and The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro. He is also the editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age.

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Cover image for John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest, by Iain McCalman

John

Büsst

Iain McCalman ao, fassa, faha, frsn is a highly respected and award-winning professor of history and the humanities (now emeritus) at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. He has published numerous books. The Reef – A Passionate History, from Captain Cook to Climate Change, was published in Australia and the USA. He is a retired founder and co-director of the Sydney Environment Institute.

John Büsst’s love of beauty and reverence for science combined to leave two awesome, interconnected but still tragically vulnerable legacies: the conservation of both the North Queensland rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef. Iain McCalman, among the country’s finest historians, brings to life one man’s journey from art to activism, locating the roots of modern environmental consciousness in a highly creative and productive partnership of aesthetics, humanitarianism, science and politics.

FRANK BONGIORNO

In John Büsst, Iain McCalman turns his attention to the artist, architect, naturalist and environmental campaigner who helped save the Great Barrier Reef from destruction in the 1960s with hugely impressive results. Vivid, expansive and richly intelligent, it is both a tribute to a remarkable life and a fascinating and timely study of how an unlikely group of activists transformed the way Australians understand the environment.

JAMES BRADLEY

Iain McCalman’s rich and incisive history of John Büsst’s resolute and brilliant fight to save the Great Barrier Reef affords us a desperately needed exemplar of what authentic love and commitment to the Earth, combined with persuasive strategy and formidable collaborations can do. The book is a shot in the arm for anyone who doubts our capacity to protect Earth’s others and a reminder that it is the wonderous nature of the Earth itself that makes ecological warriors of ordinary people.

DANIELLE CELERMAJER

This inspiring story of John Büsst’s life is as rich in character and charm as the reef and rainforest ecosystems he fought so hard to protect. It’s a captivating account of the battleground for Australian conservation, fought on the beaches and forests of North Queensland. Fabulous!

DANIELLE CLODE

We are all in debt to John Büsst, pioneer defender of the environment. Here Iain McCalman brilliantly charts his life and his successful crusade to save Queensland’s reef and adjacent rainforest – one of the world’s great ecosystems.

BILL GAMMAGE

Eye-opening and inspiring. The unforgettable story of one man’s struggle to save two of Australia’s most treasured world heritage environments – Queensland’s Wet Tropics rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.

With characteristic flair and subtlety, Iain McCalman rescues conservationist, artist and craftsmen, John Büsst, from relative obscurity, skilfully weaving biography with political and environmental history. Written with deep affection and admiration for his resolute, undersung subject, McCalman’s penetrating biography of Büsst reminds us how little we know about the history of environmental protection in Australia.

MARK McKENNA

To Liz Gallie and Sandal Hayes. In admiration and affection for your help and inspiration.

John

Büsst

Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest

IAIN McCALMAN

Logo: NewSouth Publishing.

UNSW Press acknowledges the Bedegal people, the Traditional Owners of the unceded territory on which the Randwick and Kensington campuses of UNSW are situated, and recognises their continuing connection to Country and culture. We pay our respects to Bedegal Elders past and present.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

https://unsw.press/

© Iain McCalman 2024

First published 2024

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Debra Billson

Cover images John Büsst, Virginia Edlington Collection, Friends of Ninney Rise; Great Barrier Reef, photo Theresa J Graham, Shutterstock

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

Contents

Prologue: ‘Where the rainforest meets the Reef’

Part one: Becoming a bohemian artist

1Colahan’s spell

2Jorgy’s bohemia

3Montsalvat builder

Part two: Bedarra Island life

4Island artists’ colony

5Brave new island world

6Island challenges

Part three: Rainforest and local reef

7Rainforest conversion

8Bastard vs army

9Uncontrolled exploitation

Part four: The war to save the Reef

10Losses and wins

11Drilling, spilling and the union solution

12A difficult Commission

Epilogue: Farewell to John Büsst

Postscript: John Büsst and the Djiru

Acknowledgments

Picture credits

Notes

Index

PROLOGUE

‘Where the rainforest meets the Reef’

Accelerating up the steep drive, I pass rolling green lawns and towering tropical trees to reach a white homestead off Alexander Drive. Bingil Bay is one of four villages that make up the North Queensland coastal town of Mission Beach halfway between Townsville and Cairns. Locals have told me that it is one of the only places in Queensland ‘where the rainforest meets the Reef’, and I know from reading that it is one of the most biodiverse areas in Australia. It’s also part of the larger, similarly beautiful tourist region dubbed ‘the Cassowary Coast’, which encompasses the three substantial towns of Innisfail, Tully and Cardwell.

It was a bright early morning in January 2014 and I was visiting Mission Beach for the first time because a local tourist organisation had invited me, after reading my recently published history, The Reef – A Passionate History (2013). The book included a chapter that discussed the reef-saving achievements of the late John Büsst, an intriguing environmentalist who’d lived at Mission Beach until his death in 1971. I’d be speaking to an event which was aimed at gathering citizens, business-leaders, conservationists, farmers and Indigenous custodians to discuss a worrying slump in the region’s tourist industry.¹

Two successive cyclones, five years apart, had swept through the Cassowary Coast, wrecking houses, gardens and shops, flattening the famous Dunk Island resort, smashing coral reefs, ripping up hectares of Gondwana-era rainforest, and damaging habitats of the region’s endangered southern cassowaries. These twin disasters, combined with recent bouts of climate-influenced coral bleaching, had demanded fresh ways to popularise the Cassowary Coast’s combination of natural environmental wonders and cultural heritages.²

One chapter of my book focused on what I had called ‘The Great Barrier Reef Environmental War of 1965–75’, a socio-political struggle triggered by the attempts of the ruling Queensland Country-Liberal Party to mine most of the Reef for oil, gas and sugarcane fertiliser. This mad idea had been opposed by a group of campaigners led by the famed poet-activist Judith Wright, as well as forester-scientist Len Webb and John Büsst, a Mission Beach artist-craftsman. Together, this triad had fought a series of decade-long campaigns that helped to save the Reef and establish today’s wonderful Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Our convenors hoped that publicising this story might attract a fresh wave of tourists to the region.

I’d also received a secondary invitation from some dedicated nature activists, Liz Gallie and Sandal Hayes, who were actively promoting the life and achievements of Mission Beach’s underrecognised local hero. Tragically, John Büsst had died just before the outcome of the Reef War and the World Heritage listing was finalised. As a result, historians and environmentalists tended to forget or underestimate him – so much so, that I’m certain Liz and Sandal know a deal more about John than I do. As well as working tirelessly to protect the region’s endangered local southern cassowaries, they are promoting the importance of John and his wife Alison Büsst’s life stories, environmental struggles and heritage homestead.

I’d already heard that Liz was a superb jeweller-photographer with the fierce honesty of a historian-naturalist, and that Sandal was a brilliant organiser-manager who possessed a fine mind and great charm. They’d invited me today to explore the Büssts’ former premises at Bingil Bay and to undertake a series of beach walks designed to witness some of the formative local environs that had inspired John’s campaigns.

*

Liz and Sandal greeted me on a tiled veranda that spans the entire front of the homestead and overlooks Bingil Bay Beach below, as well as a series of distant islands belonging to the numerous Family Group that appeared to be floating on the Coral Sea. They explained that this elegant homestead and its two-hectare garden were designed and built in the early 1960s by John Büsst, with the help of his wife Alison. After John’s death the premises had been sold to an American woman philanthropist who added a wing and came up with the name Ninney Rise after nearby Ninney Point. Later, she had bequeathed Ninney Rise to the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS), whose trusty officials managed to fend off intense political pressures to sell the buildings and grounds as uneconomic assets. Fortunately, C4, an energetic local environmental organisation, had managed in 2010 to gain Queensland heritage listing for Ninney Rise on the grounds of its aesthetic and historical importance. Liz and Sandal, who were still fearing for its survival, then joined a newly organised group called Friends of Ninney Rise (FoNR), which subsequently negotiated a long-term contract with QPWS to manage the homestead and grounds, restore the building’s original grandeur, disseminate its heritage significance, and develop the premises as an asset for local regional use – particularly by scientists, artists, naturalists and Djiru custodians.³

Liz and Sandal admitted to me that it would need a great deal of hard work and significant sums of money to achieve all this. Still, there was no doubting the significance of Ninney Rise as a marvel of design, construction and history. As well as revealing John Büsst’s own genius as a tropical builder-designer, the premises had served as the headquarters for many environmental campaigners during the 1960s and ’70s while they were engaged in fighting to save the Great Barrier Reef from reckless resource mining. Arguably, this can be seen as one of the most important environmental achievements of Australia’s modern history.

And even before its full restoration, Ninney Rise remained eye-catching. The beauties and harmonies achieved by its buildings, landscapes, treescapes and seascapes could not fail to enchant Australian and international nature lovers. Despite the battered state of the veranda’s bamboo ceilings, the peeling paintwork and the overgrown front garden, the property’s elegance and brio were undeniable. Inside, the homestead boasted capacious bedrooms, en suite bathrooms, crafted interior bamboo ceilings and large windows with multiple views. A scattering of John’s paintings and hand-made furniture further accentuated the building’s exotic tropical character.

Liz and Sandal admitted, though, that they were frustrated by the degree of local and national ignorance about John’s additional work in saving Queensland’s highly endangered lowland rainforests. Alas, I, too, had to confess ignorance about this. They described how John had managed, without any formal qualifications, to generate an influential scientific survey of these rainforests in the mid-1960s and then have the bulk of the area covered by its findings gazetted as rainforest reserves or nature parks. He’d also prevented the Australian Army from destroying large areas of rainforest in order to test destructive Vietnam War defoliants like Agent Orange. As a result, annoyed Army officers had begun to call him ‘The Bingil Bay Bastard’, a nickname he adopted and flaunted with pride.

Up until then, my image of John had been skewed by the journalist Patricia Clare’s description of him as ‘a very thin man with tanned skin and a grey moustache’ who spoke with ‘a dry, quiet voice’ and resembled a colonial administrator in Britain’s Eastern Empire.⁴ Having myself come from such a background in Central Africa, I imagined him as a pukka sahib swilling pink gins. On the other hand, since I’d also once been a hippy-style mudbrick builder, I had to wrestle with an alternative image of John as a young builder-craftsman who mastered adobe, ironwork, stone cutting and bricklaying when working on a medieval-style artists’ village in 1930s Victoria. ‘So’, I asked Liz and Sandal rhetorically, ‘which was the real John Büsst?’

They smiled as they introduced me to another image of John that was displayed in an arresting self-portrait. Here, in the style of his favourite artist, Paul Gauguin, John had used strong blue and yellow brushstrokes to depict a newly minted bohemian artist. He stared out at the viewer, sporting a goatee beard, cynical smile, rakish bush hat, and paint-smeared apron. The painting itself was encased in a self-made bamboo frame that further suggested Gauguin’s tropical chic. ‘A young bush larrikin?’ I suggested. ‘Maybe’, said Sandal, ‘but how did such an obvious bohemian manage to persuade some of the world’s most famous forest scientists and marine biologists to take up his suggestions?’ ‘And’ – chipped in Liz – ‘how did this dropout island artist manage to persuade at least three prime ministers, as well as several others still in the making, to join him in saving Australia’s rainforests and coral reefs?’ I admitted to having no answers to these intriguing questions, but vowed to discover them in the future.

*

Back on that day ten years ago, Sandal and Liz had then offered to take me on a long Mission Beach tour. We were first to view the local plaque on Bingil Bay Beach dedicated to John Büsst, and then investigate other key environs that had inspired him to become a passionate conservationist. With typical male arrogance, I insisted on taking a half-obscured path from the house down to the beach, even though Liz and Sandal had warned that it was densely overgrown and precipitous. Wisely, they chose instead to drive to the site. I should have listened. I had to stumble and bash my way through a dense tangle of lianas, scrub and thorn bushes. Eventually, after having scratched my face and legs and toppled over several times, I emerged on a short road that led to Ninney Point at the tip of the northern entrance to the beach. Here, a residual patch of littoral rainforest shaded into a small camping area with some limited accommodation. It was overshadowed by tall Calophyllum trees that jutted out of the earth banks at impossible angles and a path led to the northern edge of the beach strewn with rocks.

Liz and Sandal were waiting and smiled at my disarray. I followed them as they deftly clambered over a pile of large granite rocks facing out to the Coral Sea. Attached to one of these was a metal plaque weathered by sun, wind, rain and sea-spray. A fine grey-green patina of algae blended with adjacent bushes and mosses, making it easy to miss. I knew the plaque’s contents because of its mention in Judith Wright’s classic book, The Coral Battleground. Even so, her heartfelt words viewed in these wild surrounds moved me once again. IN MEMORY OF JOHN H BÜSST DIED 5–4–1971. ARTIST AND LOVER OF BEAUTY WHO FOUGHT THAT MAN AND NATURE MIGHT SURVIVE.

Liz commented on the plaque’s simplicity and power, yet she added that few readers of the book seemed to remember Judith’s opening claim to have written it explicitly to honour John Büsst’s leadership of the Save the Reef campaign. I felt a pinch of guilt because my chapter in The Reef, like several other accounts, tended to represent John as a less significant figure than his two university-educated friends, Judith Wright and Len Webb. I’d been dazzled by her genius as a poet-philosopher and his pioneering achievements as a forestry scientist. By comparison, the cheeky Bingil Bay Bastard seemed a less serious figure. On their first meeting, even Judith had seen him as more an entertainer than a thinker. She’d described him as ‘a slender enthusiastic man full of laughter, a compulsive smoker and a lover of good company’. Still, Liz reminded me, Judith Wright and her colleagues at the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ) had later extolled John as ‘our indispensable spokesman, contact with politicians, diplomat and tactician, as well as friend’. She’d also come to think of him as the Barrier Reef’s first modern martyr, since he’d died in the midst of a long battle with cancer and so had not been around to receive any congratulations.

While we were still gazing at the plaque, Liz suddenly rocked me with a harrowing contextual story I’d not heard: ‘Very few people’, she said, ‘know that this is also the site where two of the last of Mission Beach’s remaining Djiru people had hidden after most of their kin had been forcibly transferred in 1918 to the penal Aboriginal Settlement on Palm Island’. For a year or two, this young couple had somehow managed to escape capture by living simply among this wilderness of beach, rocks and trees. One day, though, they made the mistake of warmly greeting a white woman who’d happened to wander down the path to the beach. She’d subsequently alerted the police, who turned up a week later to transfer the pair to Palm Island. ‘With John’s sensitivities to the natural world’, Sandal said sombrely, ‘you can imagine how upset he would have been by this shameful part of our history’.⁵

*

We set out on a brisk walk along Bingil Bay Beach and were soon alongside a busy winding tarmac road that separated us from dense towers of overhanging rainforest that seemed to be straining to join the beach. As we walked, Liz pointed to two distant rainforest peaks on the horizon that rose above a headland. This was the outline of Coonanglebah or Dunk Island, a site that Djiru people had long visited seasonally in their canoes, and where John Büsst managed to persuade the holidaying Liberal Prime Minister, John Gorton, to join the battle in the late 1960s to save the Reef from becoming ‘an industrial slum’. Sandal added that, hidden from view behind Dunk, lay smaller Bedarra Island where John had lived for seventeen years, built a splendid mud-brick homestead, and taken his first environmental steps by publishing a study of grey-backed swiftlets.

Slightly to our right was Bicton Hill, near to the old buildings on the mainland where the Büssts had camped while building their Bingil Bay homestead. Looming above this hill we could see the brooding presence of Clump Mountain. This giant, rainforest-covered mountain had been inhabited for centuries by the Djiru people who’d cared for it and thrived on its abundance. Since 1992, Leonard Andy, a prominent Djiru Traditional Owner, Girringun artist and conservationist, had worked as a tutor for the Clump Mountain Cooperative and attracted numbers of fellow Djiru to overcome the historical exile of their people by returning to live ‘on Country’.⁶

Unknowingly, John and Alison Büsst had earlier helped this renaissance by preventing the army from taking over Clump Mountain and its rainforest surrounds for military testing. Determined to stop this threat, they’d taken ecological lessons with their forester friend, Len Webb, and their lobbying led to the creation of Clump Mountain National Park. Fittingly, on 9 December 2009, the Queensland government had subsequently declared the adjacent rainforest area Djiru National Park, which included a portion of the World Heritage Wet Tropics Area.⁷

Soon, we reached a spot opposite Bicton Hill where Bingil Bay Beach ended and a roadside notice announced that we were entering an area where the two great World Heritage ecosystems of the Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics Rainforest met. To follow this area of overlap we now had to walk for 800 metres along the narrow edge of Alexander Drive as it wound between overhanging rainforest. Quite suddenly, we rounded a corner to be confronted by a forested and rock-strewn stretch of sand and sea called Wee Beach. Here, a further roadside sign announced that we had reached the conclusion of this intersection between the two ecosystems.

Short as this had been, it left me elated. This type of continuous and formally codified Reef and rainforest overlap is rare, and occurs in only a few other spots such as in the far-off Daintree region. Yet its significance was enormous. It symbolised how these two ecosystems could and did influence each other. John Büsst had early grasped this phenomenon, and the idea came to inform his actions and achievements thereafter. On first meeting journalist Patricia Clare, he’d explained to her how

clearance of vegetation affected the coast’s relationship to the Reef waters alongside it. The river estuaries, the mangrove swamps, the shallow waters close to the coast supported life that was part of the whole marine system. These waters must be affected when vegetation was cleared and torrential rain stripped earth from the coast and dumped it into the sea.⁸

Liz and Sandal explained that an aerial view over the Mission Beach region would show that the entire area between Ninney Point and Clump Point constituted a bay too large to be seen from the shore, but which incorporated numerous intersecting maritime and rainforested sections, even when not formally specified in the way we had just seen. World Heritage values linking Reef and rainforest in various ways were dotted all over Mission Beach and fostered the region’s exceptional biodiversity. This interweaving of the two systems had long been understood and appreciated by the Djiru people, for, as Traditional Owner Leonard Andy described, the Djiru had always been both ‘rainforest and saltwater people’.⁹

We decided to keep walking to reach the key site of Clump Point that we’d glimpsed several times in the distance. Eventually, after marching along Narragon Beach and past the Perry Harvey Jetty, we arrived, tired but excited, at the famed rainforest-covered Clump Point promontory that juts dramatically into the sea. In the Mission Beach Indigenous Cultural Significance Assessment, Leonard Andy vividly outlines how important this area had always been to the Djiru people because of its environmental, spiritual and cultural properties. As well as such features as sheltered waters, lush mangroves, giant fish traps, ancient shell scatters and traditional ceremony grounds, the area boasts rare red basalt soils that generated the rich vegetation of mesophyll vine rainforest which had supported the Djiru people for thousands of years.¹⁰

Cassowary Coast conservationists today are concerned, however, that new money-driven developments could threaten the rich and ancient environmental heritages we’d just witnessed. Djiru Traditional Owners have in recent times been undertaking major grass and tree plantings in cooperation with the Cassowary Coast Regional Council and Girringun rangers, in the hope that this will prevent a large chunk of Clump Point becoming a parking area.¹¹

*

As I made my way back to the hotel that evening, I realised that this walk had taught me something vital I’d not previously recognised about John Büsst. The Bastard of Bingil Bay had not only believed in and fought to protect these interacting systems of rainforest and Reef, but he’d eventually come to embody and symbolise this link in his own person. The former dropout bohemian artist and builder had somehow turned himself into a reef and rainforest warrior and saviour who’d dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring that the ancient natural partnership of these two great Queensland ecosystems would continue in perpetuity. This, surely, was a story that deserved to told.

Part one

Becoming a bohemian artist

1

Colahan’s spell

In the